WoW~ Thanks!

Wow- I am humbled that A Year of Reading Blog (readingyear.blogspot.com) awarded my  little blog here with the “Kreativ Blog” Award! Many thanks. I hope that the people who visit will find info. that they can use in their classroom to improve student learning!

I would like to pass along this award, and award the Kreative Blogger award to the blog, Two Writing Teachers (http://twowritingteachers.wordpress.com) This is a blog loaded with info. for any writing teacher. I try to check it out daily and find lots of things to ponder…

Here are the rules for passing on this award:  (I didn’t follow all the steps, but gave a shout out to a blog I check out daily.- I hope to add more soon!)

1) Copy the pretty picture and post it on your blog. √
2) Thank the person that gave it to you and link to their blog. √
3) Write 7 things about yourself we don’t know.
4) Choose 7 other bloggers to pass the award to.
5) Link to those 7 other bloggers.
6) Notify your 7 bloggers.

 

Theme & Symbolism in one quick hit!

I find that students constantly struggle with distinguishing the theme from the plot. I try to read a lot of picture books and have them tell me the theme after we have read it. I recently  read Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting to my students and I had them pick out the theme. It is a story about a dad and young boy who live in an airport because they are homeless. It is also a good segway into discussing the topic of homelessness and reasons people are homeless etc… We also talked about symbolism (the bird represents that there is hope and that the boy and dad have hope to someday get a home). This can be used as a warm up to spark student’s writing ideas in their writing notebooks.5 minute picture book= symbolism, theme and a discussion, or at least a thought in student’s s mind about a social issue- can’t go wrong!

Mining for Gold~Finding the Golden Lines

* I can’t figure  out how change the orientation of this picture I took of my Mining for gold poster- turn your head to check it out!! )*

I often have students Mining for Gold, or finding the Golden Lines in writing. I started the year off by exposing them to writing from all different genres and from professional writers to former students. I started by telling them that I was going to read a piece aloud, and they were to read along and then we were going to Mine foe Gold, or find the golden lines.

Mining For Gold

a passage, phrase or sentence that :

Makes you wonder

Makes you laugh

Makes you sad or upset

Connects with your life

Is your favorite

Sounds poetic

This is a simple warm up activity that I do a few days a week. At first the students didn’t really know what to say, and just commented if there was a grammatical error or word they didn’t understand. I  would always share the first few times, pointing out lines that stood out to me, words that resonated, etc…. As time went on, the student’s responses became much deeper. They were looking at the writing as a writer.

After a few weeks of just commenting on the work, we then moved to “next steps” for the writer. We would give suggestions that the writer could do to improve their piece. Now that we have written various pieces, I ask some students if I can put their writing piece on the Elmo*** to share with the class. Eventually I hope to have my students bring in their own passages to use golden lines.

***I always put the writing piece on my Elmo (if you don’t have one of these – do everything you can to get one- it’s my BEST Friend in the classroom! http://www.elmousa.com/).